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csr 12.1-03 (32-43) 3/8/06 5:38 PM Page 32 Merleau-Ponty and Petyarre on the art of dreaming Flesh Expressing a World ROSALYN DIPROSE I do not understand painting very well, and especially not Australian Indigenous painting, the dot painting of Western and Central Desert artists such as Kathleen Petyarre.1 This is not to feign naivety. The truth is: I have not had enough practice inhabiting this or any painting. I grew up without art on the wall, among gum trees, red dirt, dying wattle, and ‘two thirds (blue) sky’.2 While this might suggest that I inhabit the same landscape as Petyarre, I also grew up without ‘the Dreaming’, the meaning that this dot painting is said to be about. How and why then can this painting have the impact on me that it does? And, given the history of colonisation in Australia, including the colonisation of Indigenous meanings, what is the politics of the impact of that painting? The difficulty in answering these questions begins with the ontological baggage of western philosophy that comes with the label ‘the Dreaming’. As Howard Morphy points out, ‘the Dreaming’ was coined by anthropologists in the late nineteenth century and, while adopted by Aboriginal groups to refer to their varying ideas about the nature of the world, the term erases the differences between different language groups regarding what they might mean by ‘belonging to dreams’.3 Beyond that kind of colonisation, the term entrenches a peculiarly western model of representation and of ‘belonging’ (that is, of the relation between self, world and meaning). So, for much of the twentieth century, anthropologists have said that the Dreaming is, for Indigenous Australians, the era of creation when the Ancestors ordered the cosmos and created the world ‘out of themselves’,4 a world with a meaning and ‘moral authority outside the individual will and outside human creation’.5 While acknowledging that Indigenous descendents participate in, and so inhabit and belong to, the world of the Ancestors through ritual, storytelling and art, anthropologists have taken this contemporary 32 VOLUME12 NUMBER1 MAR2006 csr 12.1-03 (32-43) 3/8/06 5:38 PM Page 33 performance of the Dreaming to be mere mimesis without difference. More recently it has been conceded, by Alan Rumsey for example, that Indigenous descendents necessarily add some particularity of history and culture to their performance of the Dreaming.6 While thus attributing a degree of creativity to Indigenous artists, this still puts the Dreaming in the realm of shared timeless myth as opposed to the history of the real world marked by evolving social meaning and individual agency. There is, however, a third term that disrupts this severing of what Europeans might mean by timeless Dreaming from the sociohistorical world of the Indigenous artist’s point of view: landscape. For Indigenous Australians, the Dreaming, according to Rumsey and others, is memorialised in country: where I see a river, Cocky Wujungu sees a boy’s tears winding around a kangaroo’s broken elbow.7 Where I see footprints in sand, Kathleen Petyarre sees the mountain devil lizard, the Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming carving up the dirt and creating a world of meaning as it wanders through the land. Hence, these paintings are now more often understood to be about landscape marked both by the Dreaming, a timeless meaning that an Aboriginal group shares, and by the painter’s specific social history in relation to that landscape. Fred Myers, for example, describes the landscape of this painting as ‘how the Dreaming has been materialized, how it has been experienced’ rather than ‘an account of what it is’.8 While this idea of landscape adds much complexity and sensitivity to classic western ideas of the Dreaming, more could be done to address the implications of its neo-Kantian version where the ‘landscape’ of appear- ance lies between a realm of timeless meaning (what the Dreaming ‘is’ itself) and the punc- tuation of individual or group perspectives. A paradigm of coexisting but independent and possibly incommensurate experiences of belonging to a meaningful world does not easily account for how this dot painting has affected non-Indigenous Australians who do not have access to any form of the Dreaming. Nor, therefore, can it account for the politics and ethics of the transformative effects of that impact. While I too share this land of gum trees, dirt, wattle and sky, it is not my world, my landscape, that these paintings are about. And yet, this land and its meaning for Aboriginal Australians, engendered through belonging to it, is pre- cisely the disputed territory of European colonisation of which I am part. On the one hand, without Petyarre’s practice inhabiting her landscape of the Dreaming I cannot share her land- scape: as Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us, while ‘the world is what we see … nonetheless, we must learn to see it’.9 On the other hand, if I learn to see anything of Petyarre’s world through her art this cannot, or should not, repeat the European colonisation of land and of meaning that inflects it.10 As I am a creature of habit in the way I see, I hesitate before these paintings. My perception is uncertain. This unsettling of my perception of another belonging to landscape that I love provides a clue to how Petyarre’s painting could have an impact on me despite being, in many respects, worlds of meaning apart. And because my perception is also uncertain ROSALYN DIPROSE—THE ART OF DREAMING 33 csr 12.1-03 (32-43) 3/8/06 5:38 PM Page 34 about the ‘about’ that is said to connect these paintings to the landscape of the Dreaming, the paintings’ unsettling of my perception confronts the conceptual and material colonisation of which I have spoken. This involves addressing the enigmas of expression and access to the landscape of the real that are belied by the ontological assumptions of notions of dreaming, representation, and belonging to a material world that pervade our philosophical heritage. — Learning to see the art of dreaming Through this unsettling of perception by the painting of Central and Western Desert artists, particularly Petyarre, I am learning to see, not the content of the artists’ worlds, but the art of dreaming. Jennifer Biddle, for example, has taught me not to view ‘dot paintings’ as iconic representations of the real. In ‘Dot, Circle, Difference’ Biddle argues that the habit of juxta- posing these paintings next to iconographic maps (this arrangement of dots means water- hole, this means a lizard’s track in the sand) has encouraged the European eye to see ‘dot paintings’, along with the Indigenous cultures that spawn them, as primitive and timeless rather than creative and transformative.11 To see in this way, to see these paintings as pic- torial maps of timeless myth inscribed in land, without history, culture or civil law, is to repeat the imperialism that, as Robyn Ferrell argues, justified dispossessing indigenous peoples in the first place of what Europeans saw as ‘untitled’ land.12 So I learn that these paintings are about experiences of the landscape of the Dreaming. Not iconic representations of land unmarked by history, but expressions of what Marcia Langton refers to as ‘human intimacy with landscapes’ which engenders complex relations of ‘human and non-human biogeography’, ‘sacred geography’, and cultural and gender-specific land practices.13 Included in these expressions of relations to landscape would also be experiences of the history of colonising encounters over land.14 As these dot paintings are about landscape they are also about colour. Robyn Ferrell has also taught me about colour, through a beautiful blue photograph she captured under water that graces the wall of my lounge room. As if to prove that it does not matter so much what landscape the photo is of (as if the photograph re-presents another more authentic canvas), it took a comment from a friend recently to show me that the photograph hangs inverted and was taken from the ocean floor looking up to ripples of water touching sky, rather than from the surface looking down to ripples of sand. This knowledge of a dif- ferent perspective however does not shake the certainty of my perception. What informs my perception is the blue and the patterns of light and the way both resonate with the colours and patterns of my life. Merleau-Ponty would say, for reasons I will get to, that insofar as I inhabit this photograph upside down or in any way at all I do so through ‘flesh’; through the elemental intertwining of my habitual corporeal style with the world of the photograph it achieves a metamorphosis of the world of my body through art.15 34 VOLUME12 NUMBER1 MAR2006 csr 12.1-03 (32-43) 3/8/06 5:38 PM Page 35 It is Merleau-Ponty who has taught me how to appreciate painting a little more, or rather, what is going on in that experience. His accounts of ‘expression’ explain why I can inhabit some blues better than white; why I can feel strangely at home among the ochre reds and yellows of Bologna upon a first visit; and why I would find myself attempting to reproduce those colours on the outside of my house several months later without thinking and with- out much success. It would be the materiality of the meaning that inhabits my blood, flesh and bone (the blue-green haze of gum trees, the blue of two-thirds sky, the yellow of dying wattle and the ochre red of dirt) that gets animated and transformed by the affective impact of blue, red and yellow things on me.

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